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Chapter 1

Ira

“What letter does it look like?” Vera peered at the long potato peel she’d just thrown on the scuffed floor of my scarcely furnished living room.

From what I’d heard, we were supposed to use an apple for this activity. It had to be peeled so that the entire skin would come off in one long ribbon. A woman would then toss it over her shoulder on the night of Sviatky, which took place twelve days after Christmas. When the peel fell on the floor, it supposedly formed the first letter of the name of the man the woman was to marry.

That was one of the many ways women used to try to glimpse into their future from ancient times, before the Great October Revolution happened at the beginning of this century and all religions, pagan and otherwise, had been officially declared the poison of the masses. However, many of the pagan traditions had endured, including the simple rituals that my friends and I were performing tonight, trying to peer into the future.

It was supposed to be done in January, not June, like it was now. Apples wouldn’t ripen for a while yet. All I had in the house were potatoes. So, the results couldn’t be true anyway. But school had been out for a week, and we were looking for something to do other than chores.

Tanya tilted her head and squinted at the potato peel. “It looks like an ‘I,’ I think.”

“I... Like in Igor? Igor Petrenko?” Vera cringed. “Fuck, please no. He has like no teeth.”

“He won’t grow old enough to marry,” Tanya said matter-of-factly and shrugged in response to my questioning glance. “Mama said his teeth are rotting because of some shit he and his stepdad are cooking and taking to get high. She said it’ll kill them both soon enough.”

Alcohol was expensive, so people were constantly in search of substitutes. For as long as I remembered, my parents’ poison of choice had always been moonshine. My dad distilled it from potatoes or from birch juice in our kitchen, making the whole house stink. Mama never minded the stench because making and selling moonshine was the one reliable thing Dad did that brought money.

Dad hadn’t made any moonshine for a while, though. But somehow, he’d managed to get drunk even more often lately. The morning when Mama disappeared, about a month ago, I’d found him passed out on the front porch with his face down in his own vomit. By some miracle, he’d survived. He’d slept for a day, cleaned himself up a bit, then left again. He’d been in and out of the house ever since, leaving me to fend for myself.

Not that he’d ever looked after me even when he was around. I’d been pretty much on my own most of my life, even before Mama left. Since I was eight, I’d been helping Baba Nadya with her huge garden in exchange for fresh milk and potatoes because Dad sold the only cow we used to have. I had also maintained our garden after Mama gave up on it years ago. I collected seeds every fall and got some manure from the Kolenchiks for helping them clean their barn.

“Maybe the “I” is for Ivan?” Vera said hopefully.

“You mean Baba Masha’s grandson?” I asked.

Ivan would be a much better choice than Igor. Years ago, his parents had moved to the city and taken Ivan along. His dad even got a car. Ivan only came to our village in the summer now. It’d be great for Vera if she married Ivan and moved to the city.Except that like Baba Masha often said, Ivan’s parents wouldn’t want a “dirty village girl” for a daughter-in-law.

Vera knew it. She wrinkled her nose in a doubtful expression.

“Ivan would be good,” Tanya agreed. “He’s cute.”

“Whatever.” Vera kicked the peel along the floor. “All boys are gross and stupid, anyway. Let’s do the one with the mirrors now.”

A shiver of apprehension ran down my back. “That’s a scary one.”

“What’s so scary about it?” Tanya propped the mirror from Mama’s bedroom against the back of the couch.

It was an old foggy mirror in a thin metal frame that was bent and rusty in places. It wasn’t big enough to have it on the floor, so we had it on the couch, with an even smaller mirror in a white plastic frame positioned in front of it.

“It doesn’t stay on its own.” Vera shoved the smaller mirror into my hands. “You’ll have to hold it.”

“Me? Am I going first?” I gripped the plastic frame of the mirror so hard, my knuckles turned white.

“Don’t be a scaredy cat,” Tanya scoffed.

Vera struck a match to light two short candles. “This one is not about boys. You’ll get to see your future, Ira.”

“But they say you may see ghosts too,” I muttered softly, as if the ghosts could hear me. Chills spread through my chest, and I gripped the frame even harder to stop my fingers from trembling.

“What’s so scary about ghosts?” Tanya shrugged. “It’s not like they can hurt you. They’re dead. Oh, what if you see the ghost of your mama?”

My heart ached at that. I’d just recently stopped crying at night, and now tears prickled behind my eyelids anew. I bit the inside of my cheek until the coppery scent of blood hit mytongue. The sting of physical pain helped to keep the tears at bay.

“My mama isn’t dead, stupid,” I snapped. “How can there be a ghost of her?”

“Oh yeah? But why did your dad dig in the old potato field behind the bus stop the night she was gone? Nastya Kolenchik saw him.”